Date posted: 11/03/2008*

Raytheon’s commitment to community outreach was on full display at the 13th Annual Women of Color Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Conference, held Oct. 23-25 in Dallas.

More than 160 middle and high school students from the Dallas area were introduced to Raytheon’s MathMovesU initiative at the event. Students came from more than a dozen school districts.

Clearly one of the highlights of the conference, the MathMovesU sessions engaged students and showed them that math can be fun. More importantly, it demonstrated that a solid education in mathematics can lead to a bright future.

Employees from Raytheon's Network Centric Systems (NCS); Intelligence and Information Systems (IIS); and Space and Airborne Systems (SAS) businesses volunteered at the MathMovesU session. Janne Ackerman, SAS airborne processor director, opened the festivities by stressing the importance of building literacy in math and science.

Justa Treviño, an NCS systems engineer, then walked students through a day in the life of a typical engineer, describing engineers as builders and problem solvers. Odetta Murray, an NCS program engineer, led an activity session that included a scientific origami experiment, where three different sizes of paper were folded in half as many times as possible.

“When we first asked kids if they liked math, not a lot of hands were raised,” Treviño said. “After our MathMovesU presentations and activities, we asked if they wanted to compete in a math contest, and we heard a lot of ‘me, me, me’s’ from the audience. That was great to hear.”

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